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The Little Mermaid — 47 Comments

  1. Why should a beautiful cartoon be remade into a “live-action” movie? Why should we take an adorable cartoon crab and transform him into a “real” crab made to appear to talk using special effects? Is the cartoon somehow viewed as an inferior substitute for the real world only made because of inadequate resources at the time?

  2. Neo, I think you expect too much of (the old) Disney to adhere directly to HCA stories. As you mention, their focus is not so much to reproduce those tales as to use them for their own basis of creation.

    Also, for the most successful Disney “princess” movies, they are also very musical and the story has to fit that mold also. The Little Mermaid started the Disney renaissance of the late 80s. You said you’ve never seen the 1989 movie; maybe you should, but do not expect it to be at all faithful to HCA. Instead, take it on its own merits of story and music. The same with Frozen.

    I will say, that Disney/ABC did come a bit closer to HCA Snow Queen in the Snow Queen sequence on the TV show, Once Upon a Time; complete with the looking glass and pieces of the mirror in hearts. The queen was portrayed, I thought, quite well by Elizabeth Mitchell.

    And yes, I absolutely hate all the live action remakes of the classic animation films. Just show total lack of creativity and laziness in my view.

  3. physicsguy:

    I absolutely do NOT expect Disney to be faithful to the stories. I just would prefer it, but I’m in a distinct minority.

  4. Andersen’s stories are thought to reflect his own struggles with unrequited love. He had a homely face, was shy around women, and socially awkward in general. Some of his biographers think that “The Snow Queen” was written after the singer Jenny Lind refused Andersen’s proposal of marriage in 1844. Andersen also found men attractive, though it is doubtful that he was ever physically intimate with any of the men he was drawn to. He was clearly infatuated with Harald Scharff, a dancer who became the principal male danseur of the Royal Danish Theatre in the mid-nineteenth century. What is clear, though, is that Andersen was able to transform his loneliness and private longings into works of the imagination that will continue to speak to adults as well as children– no matter what Disney does to Andersen’s stories.

  5. Definitely O/T and maybe sarcastic:
    Will there be a cohort of 6 year old girls who be inspired by this movie to identify as mermaids and demand surgery to remove their legs and have a fin implanted?
    How could we deny the reality of their experience?

  6. WestTX,

    Maybe so. 🙂

    I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s really amusing in the live action TLM, that Ariel’s sisters are “diverse”. Seems ol’ King Triton had a quite a few women on the side. Why Disney didn’t think of that implication in their pursuit of diversity is beyond me.

  7. As a child (b. 1952) I saw an animated version of “The Snow Queen” in a theater which enchanted and terrified me.

    I’ve checked Amazon and wiki, but I can’t seem to locate whatever “Snow Queen” I think I saw. It’s not the Russian version neo has linked.

    Any clues?

  8. Stories of this nature (fairy tales) were at heart cautionary tales and as such, had consequences.

    When I started writing my tales, I made sure that consequences followed actions – even for the gods. Some have happy endings (The Golden Mirror) and some dire endings (Wraith) but all logically follow onto what had happened with an obvious do or don’t do that.

    Many current writers forget that.

  9. @Watt – Thanks for that tidbit. To add to my post, in very very few of my stories do the characters have names. Usually because the name yields some hint (or in one case to make fun of my editor).

  10. @ huxley @ 2:43:

    I grew up in a very small town and saw “The Wizard of Oz” (color, 1939) in a theater as a small child. I was so terrified of the green-faced witch that I had to turn around in my seat and look at the back wall. This may have been in the early ’50’s. We didn’t get a tv (black and white, with a test pattern, until ’56).

    I also remember lying awake, as a child, in a chilly bedroom in midwinter in northern NYS and thinking about “The Little Match Girl” (Andersen) and how sad that was.

  11. A celebrity Andersen may have been, but he was also massively depressed, and his “fairy tales” reflect that. None of the ones that I’ve read have a happy ending — something that is emphatically not true of the classic fairy tales collected by folklorists.

    Disney is (or at least used to be) in the business of producing light, entertaining family films, mostly specifically aimed at families with young girl-children. Classic fairy tales are simply not suited for that — they were written largely to frighten children and entertain adults. So the company has always made a habit of editing them for its animated films. And the script often changes — sometimes drastically — during story development. Early versions of “Aladdin” had Jasmine as a spoiled brat and Aladdin’s mother as a major character. Behind-the-scenes lore on “Frozen” says that it was supposed to have Elsa as the villain, but when the song “Let It Go” was recorded, it was so good, yet so completely unsuited to be a “villain song”, that the story was rewritten around it.

    Disney isn’t alone in doing this sort of thing either. The Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast” (which is one of the best versions of that story I’ve ever seen, heard, or read) drew heavily on Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film, “La Belle et la Bete”, which introduced the character of the handsome-but-boorish suitor for Beauty, and made him a direct foil to the Beast.

  12. With respect to Frozen, the songwriters have publicly claimed that the defining moment for the story’s final form was when they were writing the Snow Queen’s villain song and ended up with “Let It Go.” Their story is that it was such a good song that the movie was rewritten such that the Snow Queen was now a hero, and the piece’s Prince Charming repurposed as the surprise villain twist.

    There’s also a story that claims the trip that led to the deaths of Elsa’s parents was to attend the little mermaid’s wedding to her prince, if we’re playing with connections between the two movies.

  13. WRT Disney’s reimagining classic fairy tales, the lyrics by Howard Ashman alone are worth the price of deviation from the originals!

  14. @ Watt “grim tales”

    Thank you so much for that article.
    I generally agree with the author’s opinions on the difference between most Disney films and the originals — although I think Walt’s early stories were much better than the latest ones, and Beauty and the Beast is an exceptionally good one among the latter.
    On the subject of the dreck that children are now being given to read, I also agree.

    I remember, as a child, reading and re-reading our volumes of Andersen and Grimm. They were very accessible translations — just hard enough to be challenging, not too hard to understand — and I have bought and given away several copies found at book sales.
    We also had pretty much unlimited access to the library (my mother was on the Board at one point), including the adult section.

    There are a lot of good books for the elementary and junior ages, however, and I think it is a deliberate choice not to use them in the schools. IMO, this lack of really good literary fare is part of the reason students have succumbed so easily to the Woke virus — no inoculation!

  15. Unlike a lot of Americans, I was never a huge fan of Disney (except maybe as a really little kid.) I tend to think they take other people’s material and force it to fit in to their own formula. This is a kind of bastardization. Also, I was a boy and figured the films were for girls. (There are for the record individual works by the company I like but they are few.)

    The Snow Queen is a great tale though. I found about it through Bill Willingham’s comic book Fables which was about fairy tale characters in modern New York. It was a great anti-dote to Disney. Also, it includes a few shots at the Left.

  16. OMG, you didn’t like Old Yeller?!

    A boy may acceptably cry when viewing just two scenes in all of cinema history: 1), Tommy Kirk shooting Old Yeller; and Jim Brown getting shot and killed by NAZIS! during his famous “run to glory” in The Dirty Dozen.

    P.S. Maybe, also, when Jody shoots the yearling in the movie of the same name.

  17. HCA is in the news every ten years or so. Either he’s gay, or he has some disease or disability, or he’s the illegitimate son of Danish royalty. Someday, I suppose, Danish TV will have him team up with Kierkegaard to solve crimes. The problem, though, is that both of them would be the neurotic, eccentric member of the team and there would be no steady, reliable tough guy.

    I wonder what’s next for the entertainment industry. After everything has been rebooted with diverse casts, where do they go from there? It seems like they are standing and staring in front of a great abyss, a creative (or uncreative) void.

    It’s been said that the screenwriter’s strike is because AI will be able to do most of what they do, and do it for free. The response is that they have to turn out all of the subpar, routine, hackwork to support themselves while they work their way up to a magnum opus. But how many screenwriters (or other artists) manage to create something of that caliber?

  18. Much of Disney’s success hinges on taking stories out of the public domain, putting a pretty bow on them, and cashing in on both ticket sales and merchandise.

    Tho I do not believe they will make any money with this remake. Losses are likely in the hundred million range.

  19. I recall, late el ed, that our school library had a volume of folk tales. They’d qualify as fairy tales in that they had magic and goblins and such, but without the frippery.
    They were grown-up level and my father found them interesting, many had unhappy endings, so they weren’t a Little Golden Books collection.
    To the extent, at that age, I got a sense of world view, it was pretty…dark. Which earlier than, say, the mid-nineteenth century, life probably was even if you didn’t get run over by a war.
    It was called “East of The Sun, West of The Moon”, which, when I looked for it many decades later, proved to be the title of some other book. No luck.
    My father said a couple of them…can’t recall…were the source of some “fairy tales” familiar to kids but without the happy endings.

  20. My introduction to Disney was “Bambi”, which terrified me. I must have been 4 as it was released in 1942. I could not watch it from the theater and peeked through the doors from the lobby.

  21. HCA is in the news every ten years or so. Either he’s gay, or he has some disease or disability, or he’s the illegitimate son of Danish royalty. Someday, I suppose, Danish TV will have him team up with Kierkegaard to solve crimes. The problem, though, is that both of them would be the neurotic, eccentric member of the team and there would be no steady, reliable tough guy.

    I could see Andersen and Kierkegaard teaming up to retell the story of another Dane who had a bad case of the existentials, namely Hamlet, Prinz af Dannemark (oversat af Engelsk, 1777, so both HCA and SK could have read it in Danish). There is an interesting 2018 blog post by Niels Brunse on the joys as well as the challenges of re-translating Shakespeare into Danish: “I have had many positive reactions from readers, theatre-goers, listeners to the lectures I occasionally give. And I hope they mean that I have not just satisfied a craving of my own, but served the purpose: to keep Shakespeare alive in my own (and Hamlet’s) country and, in a wider sense, to contribute to the ongoing discussions of the treasure he has left us – not to a nation, but to the entire world.”

    There is a short video at the link of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in Act III read aloud in Danish– one can definitely hear echoes of SK:
    https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/almost-there-shakespeare-danish/

    And not to forget the Little Mermaid: when musician/comedian Victor Borge died in 2000, he wanted to mark his connections to both the United States and Denmark: half of his ashes were interred in a Jewish cemetery in Copenhagen, and the other half in a cemetery in Greenwich, CT– with a replica of the statue of the Little Mermaid sitting on a large rock by his grave.

  22. A celebrity Andersen may have been, but he was also massively depressed, and his “fairy tales” reflect that. None of the ones that I’ve read have a happy ending — something that is emphatically not true of the classic fairy tales collected by folklorists.

    wolfwalker:

    Is that true? I don’t know.

    I recall a theory that old-time fairy tales really were “grim,” which reflected earlier realities and the need to inoculate children to face the frequent horrors of real life.

  23. huxley Heard that.

    Neo, thanks. I’ll check it out, although the puffery doesn’t sound like the mood I recall.

    A magic person appears in a peasant’s hut. “I’ll give you three wishes.” Peasant says, “I wish I had a purse with twenty marks in it.” Bingo, there it is. Wife says, “Twenty marks, you old fool You could have had a thousand. I wish it was stuck to your nose!” Now it’s on his nose. How do you use the third wish?

  24. Silver Age Superman had three primary girlfriends: Lois Lane (of course), Lana Lang (from high school) and Lori Lemaris, a mermaid disguised as a crippled human woman in a wheelchair, whom he met as Clark Kent in college.

    Note the innocent fun of all the LL initials.

    Clark fell in love with Lori and proposed. She turned him down, saying they were too different and she had to return home.

    He investigated as Superman and discovered her mermaid secret. She explained to him, she knew he was Superman because of her telepathic powers.

    The parted with a kiss. Sob!

  25. huxley; wolfwalker:

    Some of Andersen’s tales – even his made-up tales – definitely have a happy ending. The most autobiographical one of all is “The Ugly Duckling.” It has a happy ending. And as I said in my post, “The Snow Queen” definitely has a happy ending. Many of his other stories have happy endings that end up happening in heaven, such as “The Little Mermaid.” But some have happy endings right here on earth. Try “Thumbelina” on for size (see this).

    I think maybe I’ll write a post about this.

  26. OMG! I think I finally found the fairy tale book which burned holes in my brain when I was twelve.

    I’ve been looking for this book over 20 years. Here’s the first Amazon comment which sums up my experience:
    _________________________________

    This was one of the books of my childhood I remembered most vividly, and for decades I was unable to find a copy anywhere. Now that it is available, a part of my childhood is restored to me.

    The illustrations are a mix of almost gruesome realism, exotic beauty, and unusual composition of subjects.

    –“The Magic Butterfly and Other Fairy Tales of Central Europe” (1963)
    https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Butterfly-Central-Europe-Golden/dp/B000O1L54U

    _________________________________

    I’ve ordered it and we’ll see if it’s the one. The year is right. And it sure was grim.

  27. Neo–

    If huxley can’t find that book in French, he can always read Charles Perrault’s 1697 Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, translated into English as Tales of Mother Goose. Perrault, whose best-known stories are “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” had been elected to the Académie Française in 1671– so huxley can be sure that he will be reading French of the very highest literary quality, even if the stories themselves don’t burn holes in his brain. I would of course recommend Perrault’s version of “Puss in Boots”–“Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté.”

  28. Now can you find it in French? ?

    neo:

    I’ll try!

    It looks like Harry Potter will be my children’s lit guide into French. I can find the French pdfs. The films all have French subtitles — which works better than I thought for reinforcing French — and the third and fifth are also dubbed in French for the full experience.

    I must say the Harry Potter films are better than I recall. I watched the first four as they came out, but I wasn’t a PotterHead so I lost track of the overall story arc and let them go.

    Harry Potter is one of the few bright spots of 21st C entertainment for children. I consider JK Rowling a remarkable person for her storytelling and a heroine for her steadfast opposition to the trans crowd.

  29. PA+Cat:

    Geez. How much French do you know? 🙂

    I asked my bilingual French-American friend for a list of intermediate books written in “beautiful French.” She recommended Zola, Colette, Camus, Daudet, Pagnol, Gide, Giono, and Hugo.

    I was hoping for specific books or stories, preferably modern. Maybe something like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

    Zola, Gide and Hugo sound a little too big for me now. I’ve tried Camus’s “L’Etranger” and Reage’s “Histoire d’O” because long ago I read them in English, but they were too advanced.

    I downloaded Colette’s “Cheri” and we’ll see how that goes. Some Simenon too.

  30. huxley–

    The school I attended before going away to college started kids on French in second grade, so by the time we got to high school, we had already had years of French. I also had the opportunity to take two semesters of French literature over at the local liberal arts college (Franklin & Marshall) in my senior year of high school– my Latin teacher thought that I could benefit from college-level French courses, and because her husband was a professor of French at F&M, they were able to arrange for me to take the courses for credit. I really enjoyed the lectures, although I didn’t care for some of the novelists we read– Zola was an epic downer, for example– but I learned a new respect for the subtleties of the French language. My family is ethnically German-American, and I knew I would need both German and Latin at the graduate level, so those two semesters at F&M were my last chance to load up on French before heading back across the Rhine, so to speak.

    As for Colette’s Chéri, it’s a good story, but the sequel (La Fin de Chéri) is a real tearjerker– as you may already know. Anyway, enjoy your reading– there are so many good French writers that you’re bound to find poetry and plays to your taste as well as novels and short stories. Bon appétit!

  31. I guess Malraux is the French Hemingway, and Proust is the French Fitzgerald (and so much more). Sartre was supposed to have been influenced by Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos, but what I’ve read of his novels was so flat, that Dos Passos must have been the biggest influence. Camus also has a claim to be the French Hemingway and the French Kerouac (at least as a youth idol and style icon). I believe he wrote a lot in the present, and he’s said to be a good place for beginners to dive into French literature. Another candidate for French Fitzgerald is Alain-Fournier, whose Le Grand Meaulnes was an influence on Gatsby.

  32. PA+Cat:

    I envy your languages background! I’ve taken languages before but nothing stuck.

    Are you still active with French, German, or — who knows — Latin?

  33. Abraxas:

    I downloaded Le Grand Meaulnes and it’s in my current ballpark. Thanks.

    I can see the similarity between Camus and Hemingway. though for me Hemingway is a much more vivid writer. Here’s the amazing first paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms”:
    ___________________________

    In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a
    village that looked across the river and the plain to the
    mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and
    boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was
    clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
    went by the house and down the road and the dust they
    raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the
    trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and
    we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
    rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the
    soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white
    except for the leaves.

    –Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”
    ___________________________

    I would love to find French like that.

  34. huxley–

    I’m still active with all three languages, as I work as an academic writer and editor. Latin (and the Greek I took in college) is particularly valuable in medical editing, as so many anatomical terms are in Latin or derived from it. I also keep up with French and German by watching online documentaries and listening to vocal music in those languages. I’ve even watched a full-length French baseball game between les Huskies de Rouen [don’t ask me where they got the name!] and les Cougars de Montigny. The video starts out with dramatic music and a dark background from which the Rouen players slowly emerge . . . it’s hard to imagine an American MLB team going in for that type of theatricality– we like our bench-clearing brawls without stagecraft. I did come across a short (8 minutes) video about the American pastime titled “Comprendre le baseball en 5 minutes,” which has French subtitles and labels for the various parts of a baseball diamond as well as many shots of the boys of summer in action. The narrator shows due respect for the venerable antiquity of the game, which is to his credit. If you have the time and don’t mind a baseball video, you can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6mfj0zxDI&ab_channel=LeHomera

    I do enjoy discussing French with you– it gives me another reason to keep up with the language.

  35. My primary complaint with it is, of course, casting a black person as the lead.

    After all the caterwauling about casting a white person in a role which is “clearly” (often not at all clearly) someone of oriental descent, Polynesian descent, black descent, this is the sheerest, most complete hypocrisy. HCA’s story is very much a part of white/Euro mythos, the character is clearly “white” — probably about as white as any female short of “Snow White”. So “appropriating” it with a black person is obviously just as wrong as any of that could be.

    But of course, THAT is ok, because anyone can do anything against white people these days and it’s just fine.

    In true fact, 20y ago, I would not have given a crap about casting a black person. And, at heart, I still don’t give a crap. I just despise the inexcusable hypocrisy of it.

  36. }}} I absolutely do NOT expect Disney to be faithful to the stories. I just would prefer it, but I’m in a distinct minority.

    Neo, why should they do something which they’ve never done in the last near-100 years? 😀

  37. Huxley — have you checked the wiki article on it, which usually details the widely known adaptations?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Queen

    It does mention that there was a dubbed version of Neo’s 1957 animation released that would probably have been about the right time for you:

    The Snow Queen (1957), a Soviet animated film by film studio Soyuzmultfilm and directed by Lev Atamanov, later dubbed by Universal Studios with the voices of Sandra Dee as Gerda, Tommy Kirk as Kay and introduced by Art Linkletter.[5]

    Perhaps this is the version you saw?

    }}} None of the ones that I’ve read have a happy ending — something that is emphatically not true of the classic fairy tales collected by folklorists

    Ummmmm, wolfwalker, are we talking about the same fairy tales?

    Grimm’s fairy tales are widely known to have exceedingly dark endings, as in “kids actually being eaten”, as do some of the Mother Goose Tales.

  38. Re: “The Snow Queen”

    OBloodyHell:

    Yes, I’ve checked wiki and looked up the 1957 version. It is the most likely film that I saw. However, not in Russian w/ English subtitles. Tonight I found it cleaned up and in English:

    –“The Snow Queen (1957) – (Animation, Adventure, Family)”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaF6oqHZ-GM

    With English voices it’s a lot closer to what I remember, though it still doesn’t reach the grandeur I recall as a child.

    Though that’s the way of these things. George Pal’s “Atlantis: The Lost Continent” (1961) was a revelation when I saw it as a child at a Saturday matinee, but as an adult, it’s unbearably cheesy.

    I guess the children’s Saturday matinee died a long time ago. Back then the theatre would be jam-packed with boisterous kids, while the adults relaxed or got some shopping done.

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